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EVM Annexure III
The inability to distinguish human votes from machine votes. The votes cast by the voters are not tagged or signed in any way to indicate that they belong to a unique voter. They are simply used to increment a counter. Imagine if you cannot track money in the bank account as money deposited through a source. If someone were to gain access to the counter on the banks computers called “your account” it would be possible for them to add unlimited money or have whatever you deposited vanish without any ability to track it or have a third party audit the banks books. That is why the principle of leaving a transaction trail is important in any audit process. Now imagine a candidates “account” on the EVM. Unless there is a mechanism to track every transaction as an inflow or outflow of votes from a legitimate source, there is no transaction trail and no ability to audit the actual vote balance in the candidates account. The votes cast by humans are completely indistinguishable from any votes cast by a “Trojan” software or hardware. This constitutes as a very serious design lapse on EVMs and renders them completely useless as a transparent, clean and hi-fidelity machines to be responsible for the democratic process and controlling trillions of rupee spending, multitude of laws imposed on people and huge tax and debt burdens built up for every individual in the country. Would you trust you money with a bank that cannot track transactions to your account? Imagine when you deposit money to your account you hand it over without an acknowledgement about your transaction specifying which account you deposited it to. Would you then be able to claim, in case of dispute, that you had deposited money into that account? Now when you deposit a vote to your candidate, do you get any acknowledgement about your deposit that you can use in case of dispute? Further is there any way for you to check out later if your vote did indeed count? Would you trust your money with a bank that does not provide you a passbook or a statement of your deposits and withdrawals? What makes you trust the EVM that writes your blank check to trillions of rupees and your liberty to live your life in your country? Now imagine your bank reporting different number of depositors in different statements as well as different deposits of money. How comfortable does that make you about your bank, its processes to manage your money and the claims it makes about the safety, and inability of fraudsters to hack, your deposits? Now our crucial vote bank fails not just to track depositors, the voters, but also the deposits, the votes! Note the number of voters reported by the ECI in different public databases for the 2009 elections differs by anything between 2,572,993 to 2,899,538 voters. The number of votes reported in different public databases differs by at least 1,722 votes. Do please audit the public databases down to each constituency yourself to confirm to yourself the inability of the vote bank to track the votes and voters. Evidently the ECI has little control of its databases. Evidently the ECI needs much more reform in its technology than just the EVM. Isn’t it time we did not bank democracy with unaccountable vote banks? Category:India Category:Elections